ayo

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

godd hate to make it homestuck but.

no yeah that home looks pretty stuck you're not wrong on this one

in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense that macklemore would happily release a free palestine song that is AS balls-out anticapitalist and antiimperialist as it is, considering in 2011 he won a grammy with a song all about being poor and spending your money wisely while still being cool and looking fresh, bemoaning blind consumption.

it was a small domino to start with, sure, but the trail is there.

yes!

and that person just happened to be the person who is currently the most celebrated rapper in the world, Kendrick Lamar! he was apologizing for winning over Good Kid, M.a.a.d. City!

funny enough, he did NOT apologize to the other artists, and two of them are Drake and Kanye, which is EXTRA hilarious considering how well that decision also aged.

a lot of people are bringing up a very good point:

Macklemore has been an ally this whole fucking time, making whole songs dedicated to LGBT and BLM stuff. nobody ever talked shit about him for anything other than being uber-corny.

i think now that we're in the post-cringe era there's a lot of people remembering where we left him and thinking "oh fuck im so sorry white boy"

My friend sometimes brings her six-year-old to our DnD sessions and my husband (the DM) lets her roll for all enemy attacks and sometimes he will show her a few figures and let her secretly pick what creature we meet next. Who needs encounter tables when you have a first-grader around

She cheers when the monster is winning.

DM: *places an ugly, slavering, repugnant, spine-tingling creature on the battle map*

Child who can barely see over the table: ᵗʰᵃᵗ’ˢ ᵐᵉ :)

Scarf Patterns // Cottontail and Whisker

....really fucking fed up with the amount of people ive seen imply or outright state that anyone advocating for police abolition has never experienced violent crime.

guess what, some of us have and for many of us a huge part of the reason we support it is because of how absolutely horrible our experiences were.

things police have done for me when ive come in contact with them

there has never been a situation where police have helped me when i experienced violence and there are a ton where they have made shit much worse.

if the police disappeared and none of the money was redirected i would be much safer, let alone if the money went to organizations and groups who actually gave a shit about people beyond using them as punching bags

who would i call if i needed help? definitely not the people who've repeatedly harassed me, refused to help when needed, and take a fucking hour to show up when someone is being beaten.

probably one of the community groups that's managed to do a significant amount more with a fraction of the budget without guns or harassing victims.

You don’t understand. Police prevent crime by maybe showing up after the fact, arresting a random black person who’s a 61% match for the suspect description, and then handing the case off to a prosecutor who will threaten the suspect them into accepting a plea deal so the prosecutor never has to prove their case in court.

How would society function without that!?!

I was a proponent of defunding the police for most of my life.

Then I started working for a major metropolitan police department. I worked in a precinct for about a year before I transferred to the crime lab, where I spent another two years.

I was given the opportunity to observe the police department, its officers, its civilian employees, first hand. Every day. 40 hours a week. Sometimes nights and weekends. Sometimes nine to five.

I left the department. I am now a police abolitionist.

My partner (NB) worked for the same department for five years. First in public records, then on the street. They were not out and presented fem.

They left the department less than a year before I did. They are also now a police abolitionist.

I learned that people join the police department for a variety of reasons. Most of them (officers included) want to do good. They want to help their communities. They want to make a positive difference in the world.

But the American policing system isn’t designed to help people or fix things on a societal level. And the people who joined the department with good intentions and high ideals end up in one of three situations:

1. They realize they can’t change things from the inside, and they leave.

2. They realize they can’t change things from the inside. But they need the good pay and excellent benefits to provide for their families. So they keep their heads down, try to do as little harm as possible, and stick around just long enough for their pension and lifetime benefits to take effect (with my department, this was 20 years). Then they leave as soon as possible.

3. They adapt to reflect the morals of the department, becoming the very things they sought to change when they first joined the department. These are the ones that end up in positions of power within the department (lieutenants, commanders, chiefs, etc.)

There is no “fixing” the police. It was built on a faulty foundation, and continues to build upward. And the people in power (both within and outside of the departments) don’t want it to change. Because the current system benefits them, and people like them, immensely.

Abolition is the only viable way to fix things. Like demolishing a decrepit building in order to build something on top of it.

a little obsessed with the story of how giacomo casanova was sharing a gondola with this random guy who suddenly started having a seizure, and casanova had some medical training so he stabilized the guy until the guy’s physician could be called. and then the physician bled the guy and put mercury ointment on him, which caused everything to get worse to the point that a priest was called to administer the guy’s last rites, but then casanova stepped in and washed off the mercury ointment despite the doctor yelling at him not to. and the guy recovered and turned out to be super rich and powerful and in gratitude bankrolled casanova’s debauchery for years until casanova got himself sentenced to five years in jail for blasphemy. also at one point he got shot through the hand in a duel and doctors wanted to amputate it but he said no it’ll be fine and it Was

so what i’m saying is a medical procedural show where the main character is giacomo casanova and he doesn’t want to be solving these medical mysteries but goddamn if he isn’t the only fucker in this room who knows how to not kill the patient. so i guess my date with this prussian chick will just have to wait

this pitch would have absolutely killed at the bbc between 1991 and 2005 btw

They would have made eight, maybe even ten episodes in that time.

An asexual and pansexual become room-mates and have wacky adventures

The show is called ‘All or Nothing’

Ten years of this post

Feels longer

tell me about it

A surprisingly helpful bit of social maneuvering I've figured out from trial and error: Throughout your life, you are going to need things from people. Often, it's going to be on a deadline. And when that deadline passes, you generally want to know what's going on. So, you need to ask them.

There are two kinds of people, broadly, in this situation. The Shameless will tell you what the holdup is, with absolutely no regard for if the reason is "good enough". This is actually very helpful, because you get the real reason immediately, and can start working on a solution.

The Ashamed is trickier. People who are Ashamed are people who were often told they were giving excuses when they were trying to explain, and they'll often avoid you until they solve the problem on their own. This causes them and you a lot of stress, and often takes a lot longer to solve.

Long term, the strategy for dealing with people who are Ashamed is to provide a supportive environment where they're comfortable sharing any problems they're having with getting things done. But, there's a way to at least partially short-circuit that:

Provide an explanation for them.

One example might be "Hey Susan, I noticed that I don't have your report yet. Are you busy with other projects?" The readymade explanation signals that you're willing to accept an explanation, which is the big anxiety point.

Sometimes, you still won't get an honest answer- especially if the honest answer isn't "good enough" by the standards of the person who traumatized them. But, I've found that it often at least gets you a lie that lets you give them some slack or work around the problem.

Let's say that Susan has actually completely forgotten that she needed to do the report. She's horrified at herself, and completely unwilling to admit the real problem. But, she can now safely reply with "Sorry Jennifer, I've been swamped, and it got lost in the mix. I can have it to you in two days. Does that work?"

From there, so long as Susan gave an estimate for when she can actually do it, she and Jennifer can hash out a solution.

It's not a perfect solution, but it works astonishingly well for how small of a change it is.

huh! i've been doing this sometimes but i hadn't thought about why it worked. i like the analysis.

Its fascinating that the way advertizing and apps work right now is simply how computer viruses, adware, spyware, and all manners of malware has ALWAYS worked. Growing up as a teen in the 2000s there used to be a program called Weatherbug that was pretty much considered unthinkable to ever have installed because of the way it knew your location and essentially EVERY adware, spyware, and antivirus software flagged it for removal immediately. It was considered best practice to never install anything. Never install toolbars, mever install anything without consulting a professional or unless you were ad advanced user. I was trained in Comptia A+ for the windows xp era and the best practice as a repair tech was to never allow the customer to install anything themselves if it could be helped.

And now just. Everything does this. Your fucking calculator wants your location data and business ghouls want it to ve illegal to use a simple adblocker because not advertizing to you hurts their feelings.

And now we have generative AI filling the internet witg slop that can have SEO and more ads slapped on top of it? Google is breaking on purpose so you make more searches?

The viruses have won, everything is malware and everything is a scam. To use commercial tech is to be voluntarily mugged

foodstamps themselves are BASED, especially if you live in california. pls update your misconceptions about them, theyre not limited like they used to be! almost any grocery store outside of specialty stores uses EBT including fancyass places like wholefoods. some specialty stores do, but you have to ask before you go. i found out hmart takes EBT and its great, i get specialty korean groceries for free.

theres very few things you cant get. alcohol and hot food, but the hot food one is kinda fuzzy, sometimes things count and other times they dont. you kinda have to find out by buying it and seeing if it takes your card.

you CAN get snacks and chips and junk food, ice cream, desserts, ive gotten a whole ham, tri tip, a wholeass prime rib, etc.

if youre unemployed and disabled GET ON EBT NOW especially if youre in a richer state because you will have so much ebt that you will have extra and no idea what to do with it except treat yourself. i eat at trader joes and whole foods and hmart every month without running out of money most of the time. i am by no means living in luxury otherwise, but my food situation is GREAT and i live a little in excess ngl im grocery spoiled. theres a chance you too could get this.

dont delay. get on food stamps. NOW!

Also!! I know in New Mexico, if you take your stamps to a Farmers Market, they’ll have a table there where you can pay stamps and get tokens to give to the local food merchants!! And here they’ll DOUBLE IT!! You get a set number that can be used on any foods including meat, and then a ton more excluding use on meat, with double the buying power!!

We got approved for some emergency a while back, about $100, and we went straight there to spend $200 on veggies and meats and mushrooms and local honey, with lots of extra to freeze!! We got a giant sack of pinto beans, and a gallon bag of pecans, one vendor even let us trade for their home grown loofahs!! Farmers markets kick ASS and you should absolutely find out if your local market has a program like this!! It’s a state thing in NM so they ALL have this option!

i know this is the same case in oregon and washington and i believe california! go get some farm fresh food and support local business 💝

First of all, boycott eurovision. However, I AM loving all the various stories of pro-palestinian rebellion that are coming out surrounding eurovision.

Apparently security surrounding the event is through the roof, and the Eurovision team literally frisk searched all the contestants to make sure they didn't smuggle any palestinian scarves or flags in, but despite this:

It's great, I love it. They can try all they like to block every mention of Palestine, but they haven't been succeeding and they'll continue to fail.

Fuck Israel, fuck Eurovision, and Free Palestine. 🇵🇸

the sheer hatred of brown people in the MENA region that westerners have is like pathological at this point. the culmination of 30+ years of warmongering and the orientalist tradition that started centuries ago. its so sickening

Oh my god I have it in my 1946 Lily Wallace New American Cookbook too I’m screaming

This is it! This is the white culture we’ve been looking for!

I’m sorry are we just not gonna mention “Beef Tea” “Raw Beef Tea” and “Cooked Raw Beef Tea” one after the other

#WHY

Because the majority of human existence has not been to the knowledge and supply level we are at now.  You can’t just give someone electrolytes in the 19th century, you have no idea what the fuck they are. Someone is sick, and can only keep weak liquids down, but you know enough at this point to realise that man cannot live on water alone.   So you work out really weird ways to infuse foodstuffs into liquids they can handle to try and keep food into them. A lot of these also come from a way to stretch nutrient sources in times of poverty and scarcity. 

Thank you for this addition. People are curiously comfortable assuming everyone in the past was stupid and illogical, and it’s always struck me as showing a sad lack of empathy for fellow human beings. It’s like people in the past aren’t seen as, you know, people

Your local 19th century PhD researcher popping in here to add to this. Toast water is 100% a drink for treating illness. It turns up listed in several household medicine guides in the 19th century, and is listed as for treating people with fever, diarrhoea and vomiting, who can’t keep anything down. It’s essentially oral rehydration therapy. 

It interestingly starts turning up in literature in the period covering five major cholera outbreaks in the UK and US (this was obviously an English language Ngram search).

And peaks several times at epidemic peak points (1830s, 1850, 1880s), including its first peak in 1831/2, which corresponds with the first cholera epidemic in the UK. 

It also corresponds with the year William Brooke O’Shaughnessy discovered that a lot of people who were dying of cholera were severely lacking water and salts in their blood and urine. Dehydration was found to be a major cause of death in cholera patients. “Toast water” was suggested in the Lancet medical journal in 1832 as an initial treatment for cholera patients. 

Most of the recipes in household medicine guides I found suggest sweetening or flavouring the toast water with something if the patient could keep it down in order to cover the terrible taste.

People in the past were just people. And in this particular case, they were trying to keep their loved ones from dying of cholera. 

And here is a link to possibly my fave ever book, with some modern recipes to do the same job , including the water you cooked rice in with the water you cooked rice in plus half a teaspoon of salt - so really toast water was pretty smart - https://en.hesperian.org/hhg/New_Where_There_Is_No_Doctor:Dehydration#Rehydration_drinks

The thing I keep coming back to, with all the *gestures expansively* is that real life doesn't have peaceful epilogues.

Every single win has to be defended. Forever. I'm sorry. It sucks. The Nazis lost until they stopped losing. The US had abortion rights, and then 50 years later it didn't. Empires fall, and then they invade other countries again. Oppressive regimes are overthrown and replaced with other oppressive regimes. You will never finish the work etc etc etc. Which is why it's so fucking important to be able to acknowledge and celebrate progress, when it happens. The people who came before you didn't put in all that work for nothing, and you aren't, either. You can't save it all for the Ultimate Victory because there is never going to be an Ultimate Victory. There's no such thing as a time when everything is good, and ours shall not be the commune of Heaven.

That's why it's so important to carve out periods of rest while the war is still going, too: the war will always be still going. There will never not be a threat to sort out. There will never not need to be people showing up to look after one another.

So you'd better stop thinking about activism as Crunch Time where if you can just work a little harder until $X point, you can pause and rest. There will always be another $X point. You need to build a way of volunteering and speaking and stepping up that incorporates rest and joy into your life: bread, so you have the strength to continue stepping up, and roses, so you remember why you did it in the first place.

You cannot do it all. You need to cherish your own ability to do the work you can, and you need to rest and take care of yourself--body and mind--if you want to be able to continue doing what you can over the long run.

can I get a job as an editor but the only thing I do is correct when someone uses the word "prone" when they mean "supine"

thank you wikipedia for this really good image

a helpful mnemonic for everyone

Palestinians have also said the same thing